Life From Scratch Read Online Free Page A

morning gifts with your husband.   Or buying a new car with your husband.   This whole first-Christmas-after-the-divorce thing is making me very depressed.   Television commercials are like downers.”
    “Imagine how single, Christian people feel,” she says, motioning to herself.
    “But you have Beckett,” I point out.   “You’re not really alone in the true sense of the word.   Like I am,” I add dramatically, throwing open the front door of her building and streaming back onto the sidewalk to join the sea of shoppers making a pilgrimage to the subway stop.
    “Seriously, you cannot borrow my feeling-sorry-for-myself holiday.   You can have Valentine’s Day,” Arianna offers.
    Beckett squeals in agreement and points at the traffic lights.   “Let’s just walk the four blocks to 7 th ,” I tell her as I wind my scarf around my neck again, the flakes of snow still cautiously testing out the air.
    Adam and I meant to have children. At least, we discussed having children before we were married, and it was a base understanding between us. When the time felt right, we would ditch the birth control and have two kids and live happily ever after. But the problem was that the time was never right.
    For instance, it turns out to have a child, one has to have sex.
    It really makes me cringe to admit this, but Adam and I only had sex a handful of times during the final year of our marriage. Maybe five. First and foremost, he came home so late every night that he practically turned into a stranger; and I couldn’t roll around in bed with him as if nothing were wrong.
    The other thing is that I started over-thinking whether or not we’d make good parents. I had grown up with parents who were barely around, and it sort of sucked to be their child. My parents never attended dance performances or piano recitals, and they would have missed my high school graduation due to a business trip if I hadn’t gotten my favorite teacher to persuade them otherwise. My parents loved me intensely, but I wouldn’t have called them great parents, and I seemed doomed to repeat their mistakes, since I had no other example to follow.
    Plus, Adam and I hit a point where I didn’t want to have children with him . I didn’t want to become what would essentially be a single parent, though it was hard to admit that to my friend, Arianna, who is a single parent by choice. But even she’ll tell you that if she could have found the right partner, she wouldn’t have gone about parenting alone. Still, she has always had a much stronger calling towards parenthood and, as my mother puts it, “grabs life by its balls.”
    The woman who grabs life by its balls pushes her way down the subway stairs and jiggles herself gracefully through the turnstile, carefully lifting Beckett’s legs so they clear the bar.   We wait for the train next to a large group of high school students all dragging suitcases behind them.  
    Arianna shocked the hell out of me three years ago when she asked if I could bring her home from a doctor’s appointment, and I ended up meeting her at a fertility clinic. “What is this?” I asked, as if I was living off-the-grid in the wilderness and had never heard of in vitro fertilization.
    “I’m doing intrauterine inseminations,” she told me. “With donor sperm.”
    “Why would you do that?” I asked dumbly.
    “To get pregnant,” she said impatiently, sitting down gingerly on a bench in the clinic lobby, as if she was scared the sperm would swim out of her body on the taxi ride back to her apartment.
    “I mean, why are you trying to get pregnant?” I tried again.
    “To have a baby, idiot. Listen, we’re in our thirties. Your fertility doesn’t exist forever. I want to be a parent. If I can do it this way, great. If I have to go about it another way, fine. The only thing I cannot accept is never having a child at all.”
    Which, like women synchronizing their periods, made me start thinking of the world in terms